Angels that fall to earth

"Michael" (Gen) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

Towards the end of the magical Field of Dreams, the question, "Is this Heaven?" brought the reply, "No, it's Iowa". And for a few brief moments towards the beginning of Michael, the tale of an archangel living in remote small town Iowa, there was a flicker of hope that here might be a movie fantasy to evoke the warmth, emotion and spine tingling pleasures of Field of Dreams.

So much for hope. The crude and grating tone of this film is set with the first appearance of Michael the angel, played on auto pilot by John Travolta as a chain smoking, crotch scratching, sugar addicted, beer bellied bore who is sexually active with all the many women who inexplicably swoon at the sight of him. Michael is distinguished from the many rednecks who populate the movie only by the wings on his back.

The trite and tedious narrative - incredibly, the work of four writers - involves a cynical trio, sent by a tabloid newspaper to bring Michael back to its Chicago base. One of the screen writers is the movie's director, Nora Ephron, whose previous picture, the wretched Mixed Nuts deservedly went straight to video here. A more apt reference in her work is to Sleepless in Seattle; in Michael, Ephron once again spends the whole film bringing two characters together romantically.

They are played by Andie McDowell, whose character writes awful country songs in her spare time, and the movie's sole redeeming feature, the reliable William Hurt, wasted as a former Chicago Tribune journalist unhappily reduced to working for a supermarket tabloid. Under the uncertain direction of Ephron, this padded and plodding road movie meanders along at a snail's pace towards its vapid conclusion.

"The Phantom", (PG), Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

Comic strip serials from the 1930s and 1940s seem to be an inexhaustible resource for screen adaptations, appealing to a sense of nostalgia, with the remembered thrills of childhood fantasy given a tongue in cheek treatment.

Well, usually. Simon Wincer's The Phantom - based on the enormously popular newspaper strip and fortnightly comic which predates Superman and Batman - is blandly reverential and lacking in irony in its recreation of the world of the invincible "ghost who walks".

Billy Zane plays Kit Walker, alias The Phantom, the latest in a line of purple clad, swashbuckling heroes who have been fighting injustice and piracy for 400 years. Chivalrous, honourable and thoroughly wholesome, he comes to the rescue of the daughter of a New York newspaper magnate, Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson), when she gets into a scrape.

Old fashioned (i.e. chaste) romance, adventure and bravery ensue, with the requisite sprinkling of baddies, lead by Xander Drax (Treat Williams). While there is some charm in the glamorous recreation of New York in the 1930s and stunts in the jungle involving sea planes and mini submarines, this is plodding stuff, unlikely to hold the attention of those weaned on Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tim Burton's Batman. But the question is: when is someone going to make a screen version of The Four Marys or Bessie Bunter?